EU Auditors Blast Budget Failings

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The European Union is failing to keep track of huge annual subsidies, and 91 per cent of its budget is riddled with errors or cannot be verified.

The European Court of Auditors refused to certify EU accounts for the ninth successive year, saying that Brussels has failed to match reform rhetoric with a genuine change of culture. Abuse is said to be endemic in the Common Agricultural Policy, which still consumes almost half the £65 billion budget.

Checks on subsidy claims for suckler cows found that 50.2 per cent of animals in Portugal and 31.2 per cent in Italy were false. The "error rate" in forage and crop acreage was 89.7 per cent in Luxembourg, 42.9 per cent in Sweden, 34.5 per cent in Britain, despite increased use of satellite photography to spot fraud.

The court said it was almost impossible to track funds once they had been handed over to member states, which administer 80 per cent of the budget. Money also disappears into Russia, Central Asia, the Balkans and developing countries.

Budget controls in Brussels itself are criticised. The report says that the European Commission has still not switched to the sort of modern accounting system used by the British Government and World Bank, making it impossible to know if transactions have been "fully and correctly recorded".

The court suggested that the EU staff were abusing the disability system on a large scale, costing tax- payers £ 54 million a year. Half the claimants had psychological- or stress-related complaints. A court official said: "These are not coal miners or deep-sea fishermen. It's not normal for so many to retire for ill-health."

Most of the invalids are in their mid '30s or '40s, securing life-time pensions worth 70 per cent of the final retirement-age salaries.

The court also accused Euro-MPs of padding their pension funds with subsidies from the taxpayer. At present, the European Parliament pays two thirds of the pension cost, with the rest often paid from the MEPs office allowance - another perk worth £120,000 a year. British Euro MPs are said to be leading culprits in using the fund to employ spouses and children as aides. They also receive a tax-free attendance fee of £160 a day in Brussels and Strasbourg, and are reimbursed for full business air fares on a mileage basis, even if they take cheap flights.
The Daily Telegraph, 18th November 2003

PHILLIP DAY'S COMMENT: In the above article, for 'error', please read 'corruption'; for 'abuse', read 'fraud'. Is any further proof required that the European Union is a criminally corrupt waste of public taxpayers' money, and hardly the sort of 'organisation', if one may be tempted to abuse the word, to run Britain's, or indeed any nation's affairs, in the future? The EU has now cooked its books for nine years in a row, and hasn't even the integrity or probity to investigate itself of its pilfering. If you still support the EU in any of its guises, have you taken a deep breath lately?

How can the EU, which so conspicuously fails to account properly for our money, possibly be allowed loose on the world stage with its own army, nuclear deterrent and secret police force, pontificating self-righteously of its mission for a stable and democratic Europe, when it is so profoundly UNdemocratic, UNrepresentative and UNaccountable to the people for whom it claims to speak?

It is Ten Minutes to Midnight, and Europeans are urged by the Campaign for Truth in Europe to consider their future. For, if this supranational monstrosity is allowed to cement in place its dangerously soviet constitution over 450 million souls as of next May (almost all of whom have not the slightest idea what is going on), and it is subsequently found to be a huge and dreadful mistake, the subsequent bloodbath as nations attempt to reassert their independence will not bear thinking about.

To live in freedom means having those who rule you completely accountable for their actions. Millions died in two world wars for the nations to learn this elementary lesson. Need millions more die to sear us once again of this most fatal apathy?

Further Resources:

Ten Minutes to Midnight
Vigilance

Available through www.credence.org